1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the invention relate generally to web objects, and more specifically, dynamically determining the relatedness of web objects to a new web object.
2. Prior Art
The vast amount of information available on the Internet gives rise to the need for effective techniques for web searching. Search engines provide one mechanism for indexing web information and allowing users to retrieve results with a search query. However, queries can be interpretive due to idiosyncrasies in language such as double meanings. For example, a query for ‘Paris’ could return results for both the city of Paris and the celebrity Paris Hilton.
One complement to search results based on the search query is suggested results. These suggestions are based on the search results themselves, or even a specific search result that is selected by a user. Once a result has been selected, suggestions that are similar to the selected result are presented. Returning to the example, if Paris Hilton is selected from the results, suggestions provide additional results related to Paris Hilton and to other characteristics of the selected query result. For example, if the selected result concerns a movie starring Paris Hilton, the suggestions may include other Paris Hilton movies.
Problematically, when web objects, such as movies, images or documents, are initially made available on the Internet, conventional techniques have difficulty in finding related web objects to present as suggestions. Whereas web pages are easily described by text, many web objects do not include text, making indexing and searching more difficult. Although various parameters about web objects develop over time, such as user comments and click-throughs, this data may not be available for newer web objects. Also, databases that index web objects are often updated offline or in batch. Thus, web objects that have yet to be indexed present difficulties when presenting suggestions of related web objects.
In the light of the foregoing discussion, there is a need for a technique to dynamically identify web objects related to a relatively new web object.